Bessy’s lip trembled and the colour sprang to her face; but she answered with a flash of irritation: “Why doesn’t he look for me there, then—if he still wants to find me?”
“Ah—it’s for him to look here—to find himself here,” Justine murmured.
“Well, he never comes here! That’s his answer.”
“He will—he will! Only, when he does, let him find you.”
“Find me? I don’t understand. How can he, when he never sees me? I’m no more to him than the carpet on the floor!”
Justine smiled again. “Well—be that then! The thing is to be.”
“Under his feet? Thank you! Is that what you mean to marry for? It’s not what husbands admire in one, you know!”
“No.” Justine stood up with a sense of stealing discouragement. “But I don’t think I want to be admired–-“
“Ah, that’s because you know you are!” broke from the depths of the other’s bitterness.
The tone smote Justine, and she dropped into the seat at her friend’s side, silently laying a hand on Bessy’s feverishly-clasped fingers.
“Oh, don’t let us talk about me,” complained the latter, from whose lips the subject was never long absent. “And you mustn’t think I want you to marry, Justine; not for myself, I mean—I’d so much rather keep you here. I feel much less lonely when you’re with me. But you say you won’t stay—and it’s too dreadful to think of your going back to that dreary hospital.”
“But you know the hospital’s not dreary to me,” Justine interposed; “it’s the most interesting place I’ve ever known.”
Mrs. Amherst smiled indulgently on this extravagance. “A great many people go through the craze for philanthropy—” she began in the tone of mature experience; but Justine interrupted her with a laugh.
“Philanthropy? I’m not philanthropic. I don’t think I ever felt inclined to do good in the abstract—any more than to do ill! I can’t remember that I ever planned out a course of conduct in my life. It’s only,” she went on, with a puzzled frown, as if honestly trying to analyze her motives, “it’s only that I’m so fatally interested in people that before I know it I’ve slipped into their skins; and then, of course, if anything goes wrong with them, it’s just as if it had gone wrong with me; and I can’t help trying to rescue myself from their troubles! I suppose it’s what you’d call meddling—and so should I, if I could only remember that the other people were not myself!”
Bessy received this with the mild tolerance of superior wisdom. Once safe on the tried ground of traditional authority, she always felt herself Justine’s superior. “That’s all very well now—you see the romantic side of it,” she said, as if humouring her friend’s vagaries. “But in time you’ll want something else; you’ll want a husband and children—a life of your own. And then you’ll have to be more practical. It’s ridiculous to pretend that comfort and money don’t make a difference. And if you married a rich man, just think what a lot of good you could do! Westy will be very well off—and I’m sure he’d let you endow hospitals and things. Think how interesting it would be to build a ward in the very hospital where you’d been a nurse! I read something like that in a novel the other day—it was beautifully described. All the nurses and doctors that the heroine had worked with were there to receive her…and her little boy went about and gave toys to the crippled children….”
If the speaker’s concluding instance hardly produced the effect she had intended, it was perhaps only because Justine’s attention had been arrested by the earlier part of the argument. It was strange to have marriage urged on her by a woman who had twice failed to find happiness in it—strange, and yet how vivid a sign that, even to a nature absorbed in its personal demands, not happiness but completeness is the inmost craving! “A life of your own”—that was what even Bessy, in her obscure way, felt to be best worth suffering for. And how was a spirit like Justine’s, thrilling with youth and sympathy, to conceive of an isolated existence as the final answer to that craving? A life circumscribed by one’s own poor personal consciousness would not be life at all—far better the “adventure of the diver” than the shivering alone on the bank! Bessy, reading encouragement in her silence, returned her hand-clasp with an affectionate pressure.
“You would like that, Justine?” she said, secretly proud of having hit on the convincing argument.
“To endow hospitals with your cousin’s money? No; I should want something much more exciting!”
Bessy’s face kindled. “You mean travelling abroad—and I suppose New York in winter?”
Justine broke into a laugh. “I was thinking of your cousin himself when I spoke.” And to Bessy’s disappointed cry—“Then it is Dr. Wyant, after all?” she answered lightly, and without resenting the challenge: “I don’t know. Suppose we leave it to the oracle.”
“The oracle?”
“Time. His question-and-answer department is generally the most reliable in the long run.” She started up, gently drawing Bessy to her feet. “And just at present he reminds me that it’s nearly six, and that you promised Cicely to go and see her before you dress for dinner.”
Bessy rose obediently. “Does he remind you of your promises too? You said you’d come down to dinner tonight.”
“Did I?” Justine hesitated. “Well, I’m coming,” she said, smiling and kissing her friend.
XV
WHEN the door closed on Mrs. Amherst a resolve which had taken shape in Justine’s mind during their talk together made her seat herself at her writing-table, where, after a moment’s musing over her suspended pen, she wrote and addressed a hurried note. This business despatched, she put on her hat and jacket, and letter in hand passed down the corridor from her room, and descended to the entrance-hall below. She might have consigned her missive to the post-box which conspicuously tendered its services from a table near the door; but to do so would delay the letter’s despatch till morning, and she felt a sudden impatience to see it start.
The tumult on the terrace had transferred itself within doors, and as Justine went down the stairs she heard the click of cues from the billiard-room, the talk and laughter of belated bridge-players, the movement of servants gathering up teacups and mending fires. She had hoped to find the hall empty, but the sight of Westy Gaines’s figure looming watchfully on the threshold of the smoking-room gave her, at the last bend of the stairs, a little start of annoyance. He would want to know where she was going, he would offer to go with her, and it would take some time and not a little emphasis to make him understand that his society was not desired.
This was the thought that flashed through Justine’s mind as she reached the landing; but the next moment it gave way to a contradictory feeling. Westy Gaines was not alone in the hall. From under the stairway rose the voices of a group ensconced in that popular retreat about a chess-board; and as Justine reached the last turn of the stairs she perceived that Mason Winch, an earnest youth with advanced views on political economy, was engaged, to the diversion of a circle of spectators, in teaching the Telfer girls chess. The futility of trying to fix the spasmodic attention of this effervescent couple, and their instructor’s grave unconsciousness of the fact, constituted, for the lookers-on, the peculiar diversion of the scene. It was of course inevitable that young Winch, on his arrival at Lynbrook, should have succumbed at once to the tumultuous charms of the Telfer manner, which was equally attractive to inarticulate youth and to tired and talked-out middle-age; but that he should have perceived no resistance in their minds to the deliberative processes of the game of chess, was, even to the Telfers themselves, a source of unmitigated gaiety. Nothing seemed to them funnier than that any one should credit them with any mental capacity; and they had inexhaustibly amusing ways of drawing out and showing off each other’s ignorance.